A Prisoner Swap and a Land Grab in Israel/Palestine

The timing cannot be an accident.

The same day Israel courageously and controversially released 550 Palestinian political prisoners (though not, tellingly, Marwan Barghouti), the Israeli housing authority issued 1,000 new settler permits. All of the new settler tenders apply to areas around Jerusalem.

According to Israeli Housing and Construction Minister Ariel Atias, "The decision was reached last month after the Palestinians were accepted into UNESCO."

"Some countries won't be pleased with this, but they won't be surprised," he added.

Tragically, Atias is correct. Israel's continued policy of using settlements as both a bargaining chip and a flail is about as unpredictable as an M. Night Shyamalan twist. Whenever Israel wants something, settlements are there to be discussed. Not, mind you, a settlement freeze, but rather the dismantling of existing settlements. And whenever Israel feels threatened or spurned - and in this case, it feels spurned, UNESCO is hardly a threatening organization - the housing ministry approves new settlement permits.

You might ask why. Settlements cause nothing but trouble, it would seem. Israeli soldiers that could be defending the country's existing and much-complained-about borders must instead help settlers defend themselves, monitor supply lines, water resources, etc. Israel's allies wring their hands in distress, and occasionally malign an Israeli leader. Human rights groups condemn the activities, which is something of an embarrassment given historic Jewish commitment to the rights of man. The settlements cost Israel money, time, human and military resources, prestige, legitimacy, friends, trustworthiness. They are, at first glance, a strategic liability.

Until you look at the settlers themselves.

Israeli soldiers are bound, however loosely, by a code of conduct. Israel likes to claim that its soldiers are the most humane in the world, though at least one late Palestinian protester would beg to disagree if he still had a face. Israeli settlers are not. It speaks volumes about our media that Katyusha rockets with a dismal (or, objectively, happy) casualty count generate more attention that repeated and escalating settler attacks on mosques, homes, and individuals themselves.

And what better way to remind Palestinians, even as they welcome home their recently detained, of their place than to send a group of religious zealots into their midst, to do the work that really could backfire on the slick PR machine that is Israeli foreign policy?

Gingrich's Mystery Middle East History

Recently, Newt Gingrich said that Palestine was not a country, its people an "invented" people, and offered as evidence the fact that "historically, it was part of the Ottoman Empire."

I have news for Gingrich. It shouldn't be news, especially as the man keeps insisting he's a historian, but apparently he hasn't heard about this.

The Ottoman Empire was destroyed during the Great War, also known as WWI. As early as 1916, the Allied powers had planned for its dissolution and made secret agreements about the division of its territories. Agreements such as Sykes-Picot-Sazanov, the Balfour Declaration, the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, etc. drew lines in the sands, creating countries based on the Western notion of nationalism whose borders resembled the linguistic, ethnic, and religious reality of the situation on the ground the way my feet resemble the Mona Lisa.

Modern Syria? Not the way it ought to look, judging from history. Most of Lebanon and large parts of modern-day Israel, Palestine, and Jordan were part of Sham, or "Greater Syria." Iraq? That's a messy marriage of Mosul, Baghdad, Basra, and Kurdish areas, designed to make sure oil-rich territory remained under a single ruler beholden to the West and to ensure an uninterrupted British sphere of influence stretching from Sudan to India. Sometimes, it seems that parts of that marriage cheat on each other with Iran, and I often fear it will all end in divorce. (That's something Gingrich knows all about.) Jordan? Historically, a fiction, part of an Ottoman district referred to as, you guessed it, Palestine. Israel? The quite impressive product of dreams, hard work, perceived war-time expedience, and, in the words of Israeli historian Tom Segev, "the misguided and anti-Semitic belief that Jews turned the wheels of history."

All those countries and more were part of the Ottoman Empire. I have been to many of them, and I can attest to the fact that the people there no longer speak Ottoman Turkish, complain about the Capitulations, wonder about the Tanzimat, or address their leaders as Bey or Pasha. They are far too busy overthrowing despotic leaders propped up by the West to engage in such nostalgic pursuits. In fact, one can argue that now is the first time these "invented" Syrians, Yemenis, and Iraqis have expressed themselves in the framework of that identity.

I do not mean to suggest that because Syria, Iraq, etc. are largely recent creations their peoples are "invented." I am aware, as Gingrich is apparently not, that most countries in the world are fairly recent creations, their people struggling to adjust to the quite young idea of nationalism, their philosophies and ideologies constantly changing, shifting. And I am aware that the emergence of a new people (for example, Israelis) does not mean that people is a fiction. Change is the nature of history. A modern day Syrian is a Syrian, just as I am an American, Gingrich an idiot, and Mahmoud Abbas a Palestinian.

I wonder, though, about the selectivity with which Gingrich has applied his "invented" moniker. If modern Syria was part of the Ottoman Empire, and Armenia only recently became independent, are Syrians and Armenians "invented" people? How about the Israelis? Zionist luminaries such as Herzl and Jabotinsky wanted Israelis to be different from the Jews of old - they intended Zionism to create a new breed of human being, a new breed of Jew. Since the Israelis are so new, and their "invention" is quite well documented, will the eminent historian Gingrich disparage their origins as well?

You know what? Don't answer that. Gingrich's capacity for incendiary stupidity and confident ignorance cloaked in self-attested expertise frightens me.

The More Things Change...

For months, Russia has been obstructing UN Security Council resolutions condemning the ongoing violence in Syria.

Let me get one thing out of the way: I love Russians. I love them for Dostoevsky, for Rachmaninoff, for the seductive, sibilant whisper of their language, and for their habit of doing completely inscrutable things. For example, blocking even the most tepid UNSC resolutions on Syria.

So when, after the Russians again vetoed a Security Council resolution on Syria a few months ago, I simply threw up my hands at Al Jazeera English’s UN bureau and said, “That’s just the ____ing Russians being ___ing Russian,” my exclamation was tinged with admiration.

Luckily, Ramy, the Al Jazeera Arabic intern, had a better explanation for Russia’s diplomatic maneuvers. He sent me the information so I would stop blathering like a vaguely racist idiot in the UN’s press wing. To anyone who’s studied WWI, this is going to seem incredibly retro.

Syria provides Russia with its only warm water naval base.

Access to the Mediterranean has informed Russian policy toward the Middle East since, well, forever. Russia fought wars with the Ottoman Empire, signed secret agreements with France and England, tried to use its role as protector of Eastern Orthodox Christians, and supported Israel for naval access to this most important of seas. The Mediterranean gives Russia’s navy and merchant marine a perennial gateway to the Atlantic and the world, undercutting NATO’s dominance in Europe and opening new avenues for Russia’s trade.

To discover this familiar motive on the part of an age-old player in Middle Eastern politics in such a time of flux and dynamism was…well it was like running into a beloved friend in a new city. But it also shows that the USA is not the only country that can’t seem to escape outdated objectives in its Middle Eastern policy.

Now, as the UN Human Rights Commissioner says Syria is descending into civil war, Russia needs to adapt. One Mediterranean port isn’t going to do it much good when revolutionary governments control the Southern coast (Libya, Tunisia, Egypt) and NATO the Northern. The Cold War is over. The Great Game is over. And the world’s powers need to recognize that and act accordingly. Bashar Al Assad is one of the last remaining specimens of an endangered species – the Arab dictator. And those who help or allow him and his ilk to continue their repression of democratic protesters will find their come-uppance both in this world and the next.

The New Orientalism

I first realized the existence of a new Orientalism several years ago, when someone asked me my favorite color in Arabic.

At that time, after three years of study, I could have held my own in a conversation about politics, religion, or economics. I could have debated the relative merits of a Pan Arabic or single country approach to solving the Israeli Palestinian conflict or pontificated at length about multiculturalism in Islam’s history, but I could not tell this person that my favorite color was green.

The problem wasn’t me – though I spent a considerable amount of time in my dorm room at Lebanese American University in Beirut alternately berating myself and lamenting the past three years of hard word, all the while drinking quite heavily. The problem became evident as I perused my textbooks, looking for the chapter on colors.

There wasn’t one.

There wasn’t a chapter on pets either, or on sports, or parts of the body, hobbies, artwork, public transportation. In fact, the Arabic word for United Nations preceded any discussion of something as simple as food by several chapters. Vocabulary and expressions relating to daily life and commonplace events were scattered amongst chapters dedicated to politics, religion, and history. The word for “republic” (jumhurriyah) appeared before the word for “cat” (qittah). I was not learning a language from these textbooks. I wasn’t learning how to communicate with an Arab. I was learning how to talk to diplomats, government officials and businessmen.

Granted, Modern Standard Arabic is primarily used for political and religious matters. But since all dialects – the languages of the Arab street – derive from MSA, shouldn’t I have learned the word for “cat” before the word for “inflation?” After all, the dialects only change one letter (qittah becomes ‘ittah or gittah depending on where you are.) And in my experience – which, linguistically speaking, is long and varied – dialects prevail in every language. That didn’t stop my French teacher from getting me to talk about crepes before discussing Sartre. Even my Latin professor – Latin, people, only used to talk to the Pope! – didn’t prepare us for Cicero right off the bat; we started with basic expressions.

Hello. How are you? My favorite color is green.

Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978. His main argument was that Western perceptions of and interactions with the East – from Arabia to China – took place within a cultural framework that portrayed the “Oriental” as a lazy, lascivious, irrational deviant, controlled by an odd mixture of hedonism and religious fervor.

Judging from the Al Kitaab fii Ta’allum al Arabiyah series – the most widely used Arabic language textbooks in the USA – the old, stale image of the leering, fanatical Arab has been replaced by a new image; the Arab as a solely political being. This view is not only sad and false, it is also dangerous.

Imagine a person devoid of any characteristics, any social context. He has no friends, no family, no history, no future. All he has is a political stance, a set of beliefs, a commitment to an ideal. Imagine making a decision about how to deal with such a person – you would be like an amateur looking through a telescope, seeing what is in front of you and not understanding how it got to be that way. You yourself would make political decisions about this person, without taking circumstances, which by nature explain politics, into account. This naturally leads to poor decisions; for example, in spite of ample evidence that right-wing activists pose a greater threat to our society than radicalized Muslims, Representative Peter King is conducting hearings directed exclusively at investigating our Muslim population.

I was lucky enough to have teachers who supplemented our textbooks with movies, conversational excercises, and out-of-the-book vocabulary. I was even luckier to get the chance to study Arabic in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. But I’ve never quite escaped the sensation that our books taught us Arabic not with the goal of linguistic mastery, but with the goal of political clout. And that just won’t work – with Bush Jr, we saw what political clout looks like when it lacks eloquence.

The Al Kitaab series has gone through several editions and, to the editors’ credit, the treatment of Arabs as people rather than political playing pieces has improved with each revision. But until we start learning Arabic the way we’d learn German, French, or Spanish, don’t expect us to have the relationship with the Middle East that we do with our European friends.